Digital defence: Liverpool Law Courts research results

Firstly, I’d like to thank the defence practitioners who took part in our research event at Liverpool QEII Law Courts on 25 January 2017.

We conducted two types of CJS Common Platform Programme research sessions. The first was 3 30-minute one-to-one interviews that tested the designs of the hearing result screens.

The second 90-minute session was on hearing events. A big thank you to Mike Leeman from BLJ Solicitors who took part in this session and the earlier 30 minute session.

During the day, Rich Platt was fantastic, he helped take me to the area where lawyers get ready to go into court and introduced me to a number of practitioners. We spoke to them and explained about the research sessions that were taking part that day, why defence involvement is so important and asked if they would like to take part. A number of defence practitioners’ took my contact details and said they would be in touch if their court cases finished in time.

At 3pm, just before the second session was due to start a number of practitioners I had spoken to earlier in the day at Liverpool turned up to participate including a prosecutor. This clearly demonstrated to me an appetite from practitioners to get involved in our work, but showed we need to be flexible and work around their existing court commitments.

So what did we learn in our sessions

There were 29 participants involved in the research, which spanned 3 days and included Judges, staff from HMCTS, CPS, Probation Service and HMP Liverpool and defence practitioners.

The feedback from defence practitioners who were shown the Crown Court hearing result screens were:

improvements to the screen designs, for example making the composition of the total sentence clearer

improved access to hearing result information in a more timely manner

users have different needs dependent on their roles

We learnt from the practitioners and a prosecutor who undertook the card sort exercise in relation to hearing events:

All users agreed with the aims and principles behind removing free-text, as long as we provided for all eventualities

What happens to this information

The output from this research will help us to create and improve the screen designs for the common platform and how cases are resulted in the Crown Court. We will also use it in the next round of research and testing to ensure any changes meet the needs of users.